H4675 Is the Strongest ALPR Bill South Carolina Has Ever Seen

It’s rare to see Freedom Caucus Republicans and a Democratic civil rights lawyer pulling in the same direction. License plate cameras that spy on every car in South Carolina and send the data to a private company’s servers out of state turned out to be that thing.

Four bills to regulate ALPR cameras are sitting in committee. Three would put limits on how police use the data. H4675 goes after the system that collects it.

Flock Safety is the private company behind most ALPR cameras in South Carolina. They store every plate scan on their own cloud servers, pipe the data into a national network that lets any participating agency query any other agency’s cameras, and have been caught giving federal agencies direct access without telling the local departments that actually own the cameras.

South Carolina has zero laws governing any of it. If H4675 passed, every existing Flock contract in the state would be void.

What H4675 actually does

The bill has 7 core provisions. Here’s what each one means in practice.

Cloud storage ban

All ALPR data must live on servers owned by South Carolina government entities, physically located in the state. Any contract that violates this is void as against public policy. Flock stores everything on their own cloud infrastructure, so this provision alone would kill every Flock contract in SC.

AI vehicle tracking ban

Flock's "Vehicle Fingerprint" technology identifies cars by body damage, decals, roof racks, and paint patterns. H4675 limits cameras to license plate analysis plus time, date, and location.

21-day retention limit

SLED currently retains 422 million+ plate reads for 3 years. The other 3 bills would set a 90-day limit. H4675 sets 21 days, and extended retention requires a court order.

Warrant requirement

Officers can't access historical data without supervisory approval and a search warrant. Emergency access is allowed for imminent threats, but it has to be documented within 24 hours and reviewed by a judge. If the judge finds the access unjustified, the data gets deleted and can't be used. (For more on why warrants matter, see the 4th Amendment loophole that plate cameras exploit.)

Immigration enforcement ban

ALPR data can't be used for immigration checks, civil enforcement, traffic enforcement, or code enforcement.

Civil remedies

If your plate data is accessed without a warrant, you can sue directly for injunctive relief, damages, and attorney's fees. You don't have to wait for a prosecutor to act.

Quarterly audits and transparency reports

Independent audits by the SC Inspector General every quarter, plus annual transparency reports detailing total scans, alerts, investigations, and vendor contracts. Unauthorized access is a misdemeanor (1 year, $5,000 fine), and illegally obtained data is inadmissible in court.

H4675 is sponsored by 4 Freedom Caucus Republicans: Kilmartin, Chumley, Edgerton, and Magnuson. Rep. Todd Rutherford (D) has his own ALPR bill (H3155) sitting in the same committee. They don’t agree on much, but they both concluded that mass plate surveillance needs limits.

The federal access problem

Local agencies sign Flock contracts thinking the cameras are for local crime-solving. But Flock runs a national network where ANY agency can query any other agency’s data. Once a city plugs in, its plate scans become searchable by thousands of departments it’s never heard of, including federal ones.

The University of Washington Center for Human Rights investigated how federal agencies get into these local networks and documented 3 distinct access modes. They called them the front door, the back door, and the side door. All 3 were happening simultaneously.

The front door is explicit: a local agency voluntarily shares data with a federal partner. That’s what Flock’s marketing materials describe. But the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism found roughly 3,000 searches by Feds through the Flock network in Virginia alone over 12 months, many from local agencies that never intended their cameras to serve that purpose.

The back door bypasses authorization entirely. In August 2025, 9NEWS reported that Flock had given federal agents a secret account to send access invitations to local departments across the country. None of those departments knew it was happening. Flock’s CEO had publicly denied having any federal contracts just 20 days earlier. That same month, an Illinois Secretary of State audit found that federal agents had accessed plate data from 12 local agencies in violation of state law.

The side door is subtler: a local officer runs searches on behalf of a federal agent, using their own credentials. No federal account needed, and no audit trail that distinguishes the request from a routine local search. In June 2025, Homeland Security agents emailed law enforcement listservs in Western Washington asking officers to run Flock searches for them, and officers from multiple jurisdictions did so. 404 Media documented roughly 4,000 immigration-related searches conducted this way nationally by mid-2025.

The problem is structural. If the network allows ANY of these access modes, no local policy can stop them. Three of SC’s 4 bills only regulate state and local agencies and say NOTHING about federal access. However, H4675 does though. Its cloud ban makes the national network structurally impossible in SC (data can’t leave state-owned servers), and its immigration enforcement ban closes the policy gap. The other 3 bills set rules for how agencies use the data. H4675 goes after the plumbing that moves it.

Compare all 4 bills side by side on the toolkit page.

Where it could be stronger

The bill’s biggest obstacle has nothing to do with what’s in it. H4675 has been sitting in the House Judiciary Committee since January 2026 with no hearing scheduled. A bill can’t pass if nobody puts it on the agenda.

There’s also a practical question. The cloud storage ban requires state-owned servers, and that’s a real cost for smaller agencies. But 21-day retention means far less data to store than the current 3-year regime, and states like Montana and New Hampshire both manage local storage requirements without issues.

H4675 only has 4 sponsors so far, which isn’t enough to move it on its own. These are normal legislative obstacles, not fatal flaws. The point is getting the bill into committee for refinement, where its provisions can be folded into whatever bill does advance.

Why it needs a hearing now

SLED’s centralized ALPR database holds 422 million+ plate reads from 2019 to 2022, over 100 million per year, retained for 3 years, and accessible to 2,000+ user accounts across 99+ agencies. No statute authorizes any of it. Every day without legislation is another day of unregulated mass data collection.

Flock rewrote its Terms of Service twice in 3 months (December 2025 and February 2026), making 147 documented changes. Key changes included deleting data ownership language and granting Flock a perpetual license to use customer data. If a city’s contract auto-incorporates Flock’s updated terms, it may already be bound by provisions it never actually agreed to.

Cities across the country are pulling back. Denver canceled its Flock contract in February 2026 (Flock’s own showcase city), and Evanston, Mountain View, Lynnwood, Santa Cruz, and Staunton have all done the same.

SC has its own track record. In 2024, a North Charleston police lieutenant used the city’s surveillance cameras to follow his wife because he suspected she was having an affair. He pulled up live video feeds for days, tracked her movements, and confronted her in a Target parking lot. He was demoted, not fired.

In 2013, a SLED officer looked up his own vehicle in the ALPR database and changed the record to show someone else’s plate. His access was revoked, but when the Post and Courier filed a FOIA for any misconduct cases since, SLED refused to hand over a single document.

At least two documented abuse cases in SC. ZERO laws broken, because there aren’t any to break.

Both H4675 and H3155 sit in the same committee. The strongest provisions from H4675 should be folded into whatever bill advances. Even if H4675 doesn’t pass as written, its ideas can survive in a stronger compromise. But none of that happens without a hearing.

Contact your rep

If your state rep sits on the House Judiciary Committee or Education & Public Works, they have a direct say in whether these bills move. Tell them you want H4675 to get a hearing.

For a step-by-step playbook (FOIA requests, council meeting prep, outreach materials), read the action guide.

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